If you missed it, private sector actors recently developed a cryptocurrency to benefit the city of Miami. Miami’s mayor has been a huge advocate of crypto and supported accepting the coin’s financial benefits, which the city has now chosen to do.
MIA runs on the Stacks protocol, which in turn runs on top of the Bitcoin network. People can “mine” MIA by sending STX, the native token of Stacks, to a smart contract, which forwards 30% of those contributions to a wallet reserved for the city. Last month, the city voted to accept those funds, now worth $7 million.
Apparently MiamiCoin, which can only be purchased on Okcoin, now generates $2,000 every ten minutes for the city. Okcoin, which was founded in China in 2013 but is now based in San Francisco, is now working on opening a Miami office.
MiamiCoin was created by CityCoins, which plans to launch city-themed cryptocurrency for other major cities as well. One prominent figure behind CityCoins: Balaji Srinivasan, previously a top executive at Coinbase and General Partner at legendary venture capital firm a16z (Andreessen Horowitz).